The extreme weather bulletin

It was to be Victoria’s life-threatening, Titanic-sinking superstorm. Asked on Thursday to rate the coming cataclysm out of 10, Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Scott Williams said: “I’ll take the punt and say it’s a 10 for Victoria. It is an event that poses a threat to life, there will be a massive amount of lightning, there will be roads cut, flood waters. Half the inhabitants of Melbourne have never ever seen anything like this.” Premier Daniel Andrews urged workers to rush home early on Friday, and officials cancelled major events and lectured business on flood preparation.

Mr Williams even had a warning for those disinclined to pay attention to warnings: “If you wake up (on Friday) and think it isn’t going to happen, you’ll just have to wait a while. They didn’t think the Titanic would sink either but it did.” What happened to the ethos of keep calm and carry on?

Of course, the weekend storm turned out to be not so super. Melbourne received less than half the 150mm rain forecast between Friday and Sunday, and the “massive flooding” foretold was nowhere to be found in the city (some regional towns such as Myrtleford and Euroa had heavy rain).

It’s said that prediction is very difficult, especially if it deals with the future. Still, we can say with 75 to 85 per cent certainty that extreme weather forecasts are becoming more common, and that the extremity lies in the forecasting rather than the weather. One reason for this is understandable: no one in authority wants to see citizens engulfed by a disaster they could have been warned about. But there is a tendency to super-size risk; it’s the nanny state in a hi-vis jacket rushing around anxious about liability, official inquiries and insurance payouts.

And global warming has created an appetite for “extreme weather events”. Some long-run linkages of climate change are contentious, not helpful for a simple proof of the theory, and so a clutch of heavy-duty storms — or just their anticipation in an otherwise dull forecast — is seized on as the kind of thing the feckless human race has brought on itself. The zealots are delighted but the rest of us become ever more sceptical of forecasts that, one day, are bound to be worth heeding.